1MAN(1) General Commands Manual MAN(1)
2
6 man - print out the manual
7
9 man [ - ] [ -a ] [ -M path ] [ section ] title ...
10
12 Man is the program which provides on-line access to the UNIX manual.
13 If a section specifier is given, man looks in that section of the man‐
14 ual for the given title(s). Section is either an Arabic section number
15 (``3'' for example), or one of the words ``local'', ``new,'' or
16 ``old''. (The abbreviations ``l'', ``n'', and ``o'' are also allowed.)
17 If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual, giving
18 preference to commands over library subroutines, and displays the first
19 manual page it finds, if any. If the -a option is supplied, man dis‐
20 plays all applicable manual pages.
21 Normally man checks in standard locations (/usr/man and /usr/local/man)
23 for manual information. This can be changed by supplying a search path
24 (a la the Bourne shell) with the -M flag. The search path is a colon
25 (``:'') separated list of directories in which man expects to find the
26 standard manual subdirectories. This search path can also be set with
27 the environmental variable MANPATH.
28 Since some manual pages are intended for use only on certain machines,
30 man only searches those directories applicable to the current machine.
31 Man's determination of the current machine type can be overridden by
32 setting the environmental variable MACHINE.
33 If the standard output is a teletype, and the - flag is not provided,
35 man uses more(1), or the pager provided by the environmental variable
36 PAGER, to display the manual page.
37 The FORTRAN version of section 3 of the manual may be specified by sup‐
39 plying man with the section ``3f''. Also, a specific section of the
40 local manual may be specified by appending a number to the section,
41 i.e. ``l5'' would indicate section 5 of the local manual.
42
44 /usr/man standard manual area
45 /usr/man/cat?/* directories containing standard manual pages
46 /usr/local/man/cat?/* directories containing local manual pages
47 /usr/src/man directories containing unformatted manual pages
48
50 apropos(1), more(1), whatis(1), whereis(1)
51
53 The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on the phototypesetter
54 or on a typewriter, however, on a typewriter, some information is nec‐
55 essarily lost.
564th Berkeley Distribution April 19, 1988 MAN(1)